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ii 



speaking of Prussians— ' ' 



BY IRVIN S. COBB 



FICTION 

Those Times and These 

Local Color 

Old Judge Priest 

FiBBLE, D. D. 

Back Home 

The Escape of Mr. Trimm 

WIT AND HUMOR 

"Speaking of, Operations- 
Europe Revised 
Roughing It De Luxe 
Cobb's Bill of Fare 
Cobb's Anatomy 



MISCELLANY 

"Speaking of Prussians- 
Paths OF Glory 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 




TURNING THE EAGLE LOOSE 



''Speaking of 
Prussians—'' 

By 

Irvin Sk Cobb 

Author of 

Back Homey ' Europe Revised,*' 

Speaking of Operations — ' ', Etc, 




New York 
George H. Dor an Company 



31 BIS 



coPYiaGHT, 19 1 7, 

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



MAY 24 1917 



COPYRIGHT, 19 1 7, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



LA462654 



DEDICATED 

BY PERMISSION 
TO 

WOODROW WILSON 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 



6i 



Speaking of Prussians— ' ' 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 



I BELIEVE it to be my patriotic duty 
as an American citizen to write what 
I am writing, and after it is written to en- 
deavour to give to it as wide a circulation in 
the United States as it is possible to find. 
In making this statement, though, I am not 
setting myself up as a teacher or a preacher; 
neither am I going upon the assumption 
that, because I am a fairly frequent con- 
tributor to American magazines, people 
will be the readier or should be the readier 
to read what I have to say. 

Aside from a natural desire to do my 
own little bit, my chief reason is this: 
Largely by chance and by accident, I hap- 
pened to be one of four or five American 
newspaper men who witnessed at first hand 
the German invasion of Belgium and one 

[11] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

of three who, a little later, witnessed some 
of the results of the Germanic subjugation 
of the northern part of France. I was in- 
side Germany at the time the rush upon 
Paris was checked and the retreat from the 
Marne took place, thereby having oppor- 
tunity to take cognisance of the feelings and 
sentiments and the impulses which con- 
trolled the German populace in a period 
of victory and in a period of reversals. 

I am in the advantageous position, there- 
fore, of being able to recount as an eyewit- 
ness — and, as I hope, an honest one — some- 
thing of what war means in its effects upon 
the civilian populace of a country caught 
unawares and in a measure unprepared; 
and, more than that, what war particularly 
and especially means when it is waged un- 
der the direction of officers trained in the 
Prussian school. 

Having seen these things, I hate war with 
all my heart. I am sure that I hate it with 
a hatred deeper than the hate of you, reader, 
who never saw its actual workings and its 
garnered fruitage. For, you see, I saw the 
physical side of it; and, having seen it, I 

[12] 



''Speaking of Prussians — " 

want to tell you that I have no words with 
which halfway adequately to describe it for 
you, so that you may have in your mind the 
pictures I have in mine. It is the most ob- 
scene, the most hideous, the most brutal, the 
most malignant — and sometimes the most 
necessary — spectacle, I veritably believe, 
that ever the eye of mortal man has rested 
on since the world began, and I do hate it. 

But if war had to come — ^war for the 
preservation of our national honour and our 
national integrity; war for the defence of 
our flag and our people and our soil; war 
for the preservation of the principles of rep- 
resentative government among the nations 
of the earth — I would rather that it came 
now than that it came later. I have a child. 
I would rather that child, in her maturity, 
might be assured of living in a peace guar- 
anteed by the sacrifices and the devotion of 
the men and vv^omen of this generation, than 
that her father should live on in a precari- 
ous peace, bought and paid for with cow- 
ardice and national dishonour. 



[13] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 



II 



A FEW days before war was declared^ 
an antimilitarist mass meeting was 
held in New York. It was variously ad- 
dressed by a number of well-known gentle- 
men regarding whose purity of motive there 
could be no question, but regarding whose 
judgment a great majority of us have an 
opinion that cannot be printed without the 
use of asterisks. And it was attended by 
a very large representation of peace-loving 
citizens, including a numerous contingent 
of those peculiar patriots who, for the past 
two years, have been so very distressed if 
any suggestion of hostilities with the Cen- 
tral Powers was offered, but so agreeably 
reconciled if a break with the Allies, or any 
one of them, seemed a contingency. 

It may have been only a coincidence, but 
it struck some of us as a significant fact 
that, from the time of the dismissal of Count 
Yon Bernstorflf onward, the average pro- 
peace meeting was pretty sure to resolve 
itself into something rather closely resem- 

[14] 



' 'Speaking of Prussians — ' ' 

bling a pro-German demonstration before 
the evening was over. Persons who hissed 
the name of our President behaved with 
respectful decorum when mention was made 
of a certain Kaiser. 

However, I am not now concerned with 
these weird Americans, some of whom part 
their Americanism in the middle with a 
hyphen. Some of them were in jail before 
this little book was printed. I am think- 
ing now of those national advocates of the 
policy of the turned cheek; those profes- 
sional pacificists; those wavers of the olive 
branch — who addressed this particular 
meeting and similar meetings that preceded 
it — little brothers to the worm and the sheep 
and the guinea pig, all of them — who 
preached not defence, but submission; not 
a firm stand, but a complete surrender; not 
action, but words, words, words. 



Ill 



EVERY right-thinking man, I take 
it, believes in universal peace and 
realises, too, that we shall have universal 

[15] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

peace in that fair day when three human 
attributes, now reasonably common among 
individuals and among nations, have been 
eliminated out of this world, these three 
being greed, jealousy and evil temper. 
Every sane American hopes for the time of 
universal disarmament, and meantime in- 
dulges in one mental reservation : He wants 
all the nations to put aside their arms; but 
he hopes his own nation will be the last to 
put aside hers. But not every American — 
thanks be to God! — has in these months and 
years of our campaign for preparedness 
favoured leaving his country in a state 
where she might be likened to a large, fat, 
rich, flabby oyster, without any shell, in a 
sea full of potential or actual enemies, all 
clawed, all toothed, all hungry. The oyster 
may be the more popular, but it is the hard- 
shelled crab that makes the best life-insur- 
ance risk. 

And when I read the utterances of those 
conscientious gentlemen, who could not be 
brought to bear the idea of going to w^ar 
with any nation for any reason, I wished 
with all my soul they might have stood with 

[16] 



'' speaking of Prussians — " 

me in Belgium on that August day, when I 
and the rest of the party to which I be- 
longed saw the German legions come pour- 
ing down, a cloud of smoke by day and a 
pillar of fire by night, with terror riding 
before them as their herald, and death and 
destruction and devastation in the tracks 
their war-shod feet left upon a smiling and 
a fecund little land. Because I am firmly 
of the opinion that their sentiments would 
then have undergone the same instantaneous 
transformation which the feelings of each 
member of my group underwent. 

Speaking for myself, I confess that, un- 
til that summer day of the year 19 14, I had 
thought — such infrequent times as I gave 
the subject any thought at all — that for us 
to spend our money on heavy guns and an 
augmented navy, for us to dream of com- 
pulsory military training and a larger stand- 
ing army, would be the concentrated essence 
of economic and national folly. 

I remember when Colonel Roosevelt — 
then, I believe. President Roosevelt — de- 
livered himself of the doctrine of the Big 
Stick, I, being a good Democrat, regarded 

[in 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

him as an incendiary who would provoke 
the ill will of great Powers, which had for 
us only kindly feeling, by the shaking in 
their faces of an armed fist. I remember 
I had said to myself, as, no doubt, most 
Americans had said to themselves : 

^We are a peaceful nation; not concerned 
with dreams of conquest. We have the 
[Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans for our pro- 
tection. We are not going to make war 
on anybody else. Nobody else is going 
to make war on us. War is going out of 
fashion all over the planet. A passion for 
peace is coming to be the fashion of the 
world. The lion and the lamb lie down 
together." 

Well, the lion and the lamb did lie down 
together — ^over there in Europe; and when 
the lion rose, a raging lion, he had the 
mangled carcass of the lamb beneath his 
bloodied paws. And it was on the day 
when I first saw the lion, with his jaws 
adrip, coming down the highroads, typified 
in half a million fighting men — men whose 
sole business in life was to fight, and who 
knew their business as no other people ever 

[18] 



' 'Speaking of Prussians — ' ^ 

have known it — that in one flash of time I 
decided I wanted niy country to quit being 
lamb-like, not because the lion was a pleas- 
ing figure before mine eyes, but because for 
the first time I realised that, so long as there 
are lions, sooner or later must come oppres- 
sion and annihilation for the nation which 
persists in being one of the lambs. 

As though it happened yesterday, instead 
of thirty months ago, I can recreate in my 
mind the physical and the mental stage set- 
tings of that moment. I can shut my eyes 
and see the German firing squad shooting 
two Belgian civilians against a brick wall. I 
can smell the odours of the burning houses. 
Yes, and the smell of the burning flesh of 
the dead men who were in those houses. I 
can hear the sound of the footsteps of the 
fleeing villagers and the rumble of the tread 
of the invaders going by so countlessly, 
so confidently, so triumphantly, so mag- 
nificently disciplined and so faultlessly 
equipped. 

Most of all, I can see the eyes and the 
faces of sundry German officers with whom 
I spoke. And when I do this I see their 

[19] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '^ 

eyes shining with joy and their faces trans- 
figured as though by a splendid vision; and 
I can hear them — not proclaiming the jus- 
tice of their cause; not seeking excuse for 
the reprisals they had ordered; not, save 
for a few exceptions among them, deploring 
the unutterable misery and suffering their 
invasion of Belgium had wrought; not con- 
cerned with the ethical rights of helpless 
and innocent noncombatants — but proud 
and swollen with the thought that, at every 
onward step, ruthlessness and determina- 
tion and being ready had brought to them 
victory, conquest, spoils of war. Why, these 
men were like beings from another world — 
a world of whose existence we, on this side 
of the water, had never dreamed. 

And it was then I promised myself, if I 
had the luck to get back home again with 
a whole skin and a tongue in my head and 
a pen in my hand, I would in my humble 
way preach preparedness for America; not 
preparedness with a view necessarily of 
making war upon any one else, but pre- 
paredness with a view essentially of keep- 
ing any one else from making war upon 

[20] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

us without counting the risks beforehand. 

In my own humble and personal way I 
have been preaching it. In my own humble 
and personal way I am preaching it right 
this minute. And if my present narrative is 
so very personal it is because I know that 
the personal illustration is the best possible 
illustration, and that one may drive home 
his point by telling the things he himself 
has seen and felt better than by dealing with 
the impressions and the facts which have 
come to him at secondhand. 

Also, it seems to me, since the break 
came, that now I am free to use weapons 
which I did not feel I had the right to 
use before that break did come. Before, 
I was a newspaper reporter, engaged in 
describing what I saw and what I heard — 
not what I suspected and what I feared. 
Before, I was a neutral citizen of a neutral 
country. 

I am not a neutral any more. I am an 
American! My country has clashed with 
a foreign Power, and the enemy of my coun- 
try is my enemy and deserving of no more 
consideration at my hands than he deserves 

[21] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

at the hands of my country. Moreover, I 
aim to try to show, as we go along, that 
any consideration of mercy or charity or 
magnanimity which we might show him 
would be misinterpreted. Being what he is 
he would not understand it. He would con- 
sider it as an evidence of weakness upon 
our part. It is what he would not show 
us, and if opportunity comes will not show 
us, any more than he showed it to Belgium 
or to France, or to Edith Cavell, or to those 
women and those babies on the Lusitania. 
He did not make war cruel — it already 
was that; but he has kept it cruel. War 
with him is not an emotional pastime; not 
a time for hysterical lip service to his flag; 
not a time for fuss and feathers. And, most 
of all, it is to him not a time for any dis- 
play of mawkish, maudlin forbearance to 
his foe; but, instead, it is a deadly serious, 
deadly terrible business, to the successful 
prosecution of which he and his rulers, and 
his government, and his whole system of 
life have been earnestly and sincerely dedi- 
cated through a generation of preparation, 
mental as well as physical. 

[22] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 



IV 



WHEN I think back on those first 
stages — and in some respects the 
most tragic stages — of the great war, I do 
not see it as a thing of pomp and glory, 
of splendid panorama, pitched on a more 
impressive scale than any movement ever 
was in all the history of mankind, I do 
not, in retrospect, see the sunlight glinting 
on the long, unending, weaving lanes of 
bayonets; or the troops pouring in grey 
streams, like molten quicksilver, along all 
those dusty highroads of Northern Europe; 
or the big guns belching; or the artillery 
horses going galloping into action; or the 
trenches; or the camps; or the hospitals; or 
the battlefields. I see it as it is reflected in 
certain little, detached pictures — small- 
focused, and incidental to the great horror 
of which they were an unconsidered part 
— but which, to me, typify, most fitly of all, 
what war means when waged by the rote 
and rule of Prussian militarism upon the 
civilian populace of an invaded country. 

[2Z^ 



'^ speaking of Prussians — " 

I see again the little red-bearded priest 
of Louvain who met us on the day we first 
entered that town; who took us out of the 
panic of the street where the inhabitants 
fluttered about in aimless terror, like fright- 
ened fowl in a barnyard; and who led the 
way for us through a little wooden gate- 
way, set in the face of a high brick wall. 
It was as though we were in another world 
then, instead of the little world of panic 
and distress we had just quit. About a neg- 
lected tennis court grew a row of pear trees, 
and under a laden grape arbour at the back 
sat four more priests, all in rusty black 
gowns. They got up from where they sat 
and came and spoke to us, and took us into 
a little cellar room, where they gave us a 
bottle of their homemade wine to drink and 
handfuls of their ripened pears to eat, and 
tried to point out to us, on a map, where 
they thought the oncoming Germans might 
be, none of us knowing that already uhlan 
scouts were entering the next street but one. 
As we were leaving, the eldest priest took 
me by the coat lapels and, with his kind, 
faded old eyes brimming and his gentle old 

[24] 



'^speaking of Prussians — " 

face quivering, he said to me in broken 
English : 

^'My son, it is not right that war should 
come to Belgium. We had no part in the 
quarrel of these, our great neighbours. My 
son, we are not a bad people here — do not 
believe them should they tell you so. For 
I tell you we are a good people. We are 
a very good people. All the week my peo- 
ple work very hard, and on Sunday they go 
to church; and then perhaps they go for a 
walk in the fields. And that, to them, is all 
they know of life. 

*^My son," he said, "you come from a 
great country — you come from the greatest 
of all the countries. Surely your country, 
which is so great and so strong, will not let 
my little country perish from off the face 
of the earth?" 

Because we had no answer for him we 
went away. And when, six weeks later, I 
returned to ruined and devastated Louvain, 
I picked my way through the hideous 
wreckage of the streets to the little monas- 
tery again. Behold! the brick wall was 
a broken heap of wrecked, charred mason- 

[25] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

work; and the pear trees were naked 
stumps, which stood up out of a clay waste; 
and the little cellar room, where we ate our 
pears and drank our wine, was a hole in the 
ground now, full of ill-smelling rubbish 
and fouled water, with the rotted and 
bloated corpse of a dead horse floating in 
the water, poisoning the air with the prom- 
ise of pestilence. And the priests who once 
had lived there were gone; and none in all 
that town knew where they had gone. 

Always, too, when thinking of the war, 
I think of the refugees I saw, but mostly 
of those I saw after Antwerp had fallen in 
the early days of October and I was skirting 
Holland on my way back out of Germany to 
the English Channel. I had seen enough 
refugees before then, God knows ! — men and 
women and children, old men and old 
women and little children and babies in 
arms, fleeing by the lights of their own 
burning houses over rainy, wind-swept, 
muddy roads; vast caravans of homeless 
misery, whose members marched on and on 
until they dropped from exhaustion. And 
when they had rested a while at the miry 

[26] 



''Speaking of Prussians — " 

roadside, with no beds beneath them but 
the earth and no shelters above them but 
the black umbrellas to which they clung, 
they got up and went on again, with no des- 
tination in view and no goal ahead; but 
only knowing, I suppose, that what might 
lie in front of them could not be worse 
than what they left behind them. But 
never — until after Antwerp — did there 
seem to be so many of them, and never did 
their plight seem so pitiable. Over every 
road that ran up out of Belgium into Hol- 
land — and that in this populous corner of 
Europe meant a road every little while — 
they poured all day in thick, jostling, un- 
ending, unbroken streams. I marked how 
the sides of every wayside building along 
the Dutch frontier was scrawled over with 
the names of hundreds of refugees, who al- 
ready had passed that way; and, along with 
their names, the names of their own people, 
from whom they were separated in the haste 
and terror of flight, and who — by one 
chance in a thousand — might come that way 
and read what was there written, and fol- 
low on. 

[27] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '^ 

This was the larger picture. Now for a 
small corner of the canvas: I remember a 
squalid little cowshed in a little Dutch town 
on the border, just before dusk of a wet, 
raw autumnal night. Under the dripping 
eaves of that cowshed stood an old man — 
a very old man. He must have been all of 
eighty. His garments were sopping wet, 
and all that he owned now of this world's 
goods rested at his feet, tied up in the rags 
of an old red tablecloth. In one withered, 
trembling old hand he held a box of 
matches, and in the other a piece of chalk. 
With one hand he scratched match after 
match; and with the other, on the wall of 
that little cowshed, he wrote, over and over 
and over again, his name; and beneath it 
the name of the old wife from whom he 
was separated — doubtlessly forever. 

Possibly these things might have come to 
pass in any war, whether or not Germans 
were concerned in making that war; prob- 
ably they should be included among the in- 
evitable by-products of the institution 
called warfare. That, however, did not 
make them the less sorrowful. 

[28] 






"Speaking of Prussians — '^ 



V 

THE point I am trying to make is this: 
That, seeing such sights, and a thou- 
sand more like them, I could picture the 
same things — and a thousand worse things 
— happening in my own country. With 
better reason, I to-day can picture them as 
happening in my own country; and in all 
fairness I go further than that and say that 
I can conceive them as being all the more 
likely to happen should the invading forces 
come at us under that design of a black 
vulture which is known as the Imperial 
Prussian Eagle. Given similar conditions 
and similar opportunities, and I can see 
Holyoke, Massachusetts, or Charleston, 
South Carolina, razed in smoking ruins, as 
Louvain or as Dinant was. I can see the 
mayor of Baltimore being put to death by 
drum-head court-martial because some in- 
flamed civilian of his town fired from a 
cottage window at a Pomeranian grenadier. 
I can see in Pennsylvania congressmen and 
judges and clergymen and G. A. R. veter- 

[29] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

ans held as hostages and as potential vic- 
tims of the firing squad, in case some son or 
some grandson of old John Burns, of Get- 
tysburg, not regularly enrolled, takes up 
his shotgun in defence of his homestead. I 
can see a price put on the head of some mod- 
ern Molly Pitcher, and a military prison 
waiting for some latter-day Barbara 
Frietchie. For we must remember that what 
we Americans call patriots the anointed 
War Lord calls franc-tireurs, meaning 
bushwhackers. 

I do not believe I personally can be 
charged with an evinced bias against the 
German Army, as based on what I saw of 
its operations in the opening months of the 
war. Because I had an admiration for the 
courage and the fortitude of the German 
common soldier, and because I expressed 
that admiration, I was charged with being 
pro-German by persons who seemingly did 
not understand or want to understand that 
a spectator may admire the individual with- 
out in the least sympathising with the causes 
which sent him into the field. And at a 
time when this country was filled with 

[30] 



''Speaking of Prussians — " 

stories of barbarities committed upon Bel- 
gian civilians by German soldiers — stories 
of the mutilating of babies, of the raping of 
women, of the torturing of old men — I was 
one of five experienced newspapermen who, 
all of our own free will and not under 
duress or coercion, signed a statement in 
which we severally and jointly stated that, 
in our experiences when travelling with or 
immediately behind the German columns 
through upward of a hundred miles of Bel- 
gian territory, we had been unable to dis- 
cover good evidence of a single one of these 
alleged atrocities. Nor did we. 

What I tried to point out at the time — 
in the fall of 1914 — and what I would point 
out again in justice to those who now are 
our enemies, is that identically the same ac- 
counts of atrocities which were told in Eng- 
land and in America as having been per- 
petrated by Germans upon Belgians and 
Frenchmen, were simultaneously repeated 
in Germany as having been perpetrated by 
Belgians and Frenchmen upon German 
nuns and German wounded ; and were just 
as firmly believed in Germany as in Amer- 

[31] 



'' speaking of Prussians — " 

ica and Britain, and had, as I veritably be- 
lieve, just as little foundation of fact in one 
quarter as in the other quarters. 

Indeed, I am willing to go still further 
and say, because of the rigorous discipline 
by which the German common soldier is 
bound, that in the German occupation of 
hostile territory opportunities for the indi- 
vidual brute or the individual degenerate 
to commit excesses against the individual 
victim were greatly reduced. Of course 
there must have been sporadic instances of 
hideous acts — there always have been 
where men went to war; but I have 
never been able to bring myself to believe 
that such acts could have been a part of a 
systematic or organised campaign of fright- 
fulness. There was plenty of the f rightful- 
ness without these added horrors. 

But I was an eyewitness to crimes which, 
measured by the standards of humanity and 
civilisation, impressed me as worse than any 
individual excess, any individual outrage, 
could ever have been or can ever be; be- 
cause these crimes indubitably were insti- 
gated on a wholesale basis by order of of- 

[32] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '^ 

ficers of rank, and must have been carried 
out under their personal supervision, direc- 
tion and approval. Briefly, what I saw 
was this : I saw wide areas of Belgium and 
France in which not a penny's worth of 
wanton destruction had been permitted to 
occur, in which the ripe pears hung un- 
touched upon the garden walls ; and I saw 
other wide areas where scarcely one stone 
had been left to stand upon another; where 
the fields were ravaged; where the male 
villagers had been shot in squads; where 
the miserable survivors had been left to den 
in holes, like wild beasts. 

Taking the physical evidence offered be- 
fore our own eyes, and buttressing it with 
the statements made to us, not only by na- 
tives but by German soldiers and German 
officers, we could reach but one conclusion, 
which was that here, in such-and-such a 
place, those in command had said to the 
troops: ^^Spare this town and these peo- 
ple!" And there they had said: 'Waste 
this town and shoot these people!" And 
here the troops had discriminately spared, 
and there they had indiscriminately wasted, 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

in exact accordance with the word of their 
superiors. 

VI 

DOUBTLESSLY you read the pub- 
lished extracts from diaries taken off 
the bodies of killed or captured German 
soldiers in the first year of the war. Didn't 
you often read where this soldier or that, 
setting down his own private thoughts, had 
lamented at having been required to put 
his hand to the task of killing and destroy- 
ing? But, from this same source, did you 
ever get evidence that any soldier had actu- 
ally revolted against this campaign of 
cruelty, and had refused to burn the homes 
of helpless civilians or to slay unresisting 
noncombatants? You did not, and for a 
very good reason : Because that rebellious 
soldier would never have lived long enough 
to write down the record of his humanity 
— he would have been shot dead by the re- 
volver of his own captain or his own lieu- 
tenant. 

I saw German soldiers marching through 
a wrecked and ravished countryside, sing- 

[34] 



^ 'Speaking of Prussians — ' ' 

ing their German songs about the home 
place, and the Christmas tree, and the Rhine 
maiden — creatures so full of sentiment that 
they had no room in their souls for sym- 
pathy. And, by the same token, I saw Ger- 
man soldiers dividing their rations with 
hungry Belgians. They divided their ra- 
tions with these famished ones because it 
was not verhoten — because there was no or- 
der to the contrary. Had there been an 
order to the contrary, those poor women 
and those scrawny children might have 
starved, and no German soldier, whatever 
his private feelings, would have dared of- 
fer to them a crust of bread or a bone of 
beef. Of that I am very sure. 

And it seemed to me then, and it seems 
to me now, a most dangerous thing for all 
the peoples of the earth, and a most evil 
thing, that into the world should come a 
scheme of military government so hellishly 
contrived and so exactly directed that, by 
the flirt of a colonel's thumb, a thousand 
men may, at will, be transformed from 
kindly, courageous, manly soldiers into re- 
lentless, ruthless executioners and incen- 

[35] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

diaries ; and, by another flirt of that supreme 
and arrogant thumb, be converted back 
again into decent men. 



VII 

IN peace the mental docility of the Ger- 
man, his willingness to accept an order 
unquestioningly and mechanically to obey 
it, may be a virtue, as we reckon racial traits 
of a people among their virtues; in war 
this same trait becomes a vice. In peace it 
makes him yet more peaceful; in war it 
gives to his manner of waging war an added 
sinister menace. 

It is that very menace which must con- 
front the American troopers who may be 
sent abroad for service. It is that very 
menace which must confront our people at 
home in the event that the enemy shall get 
near enough to our coasts to bombard our 
shore cities, or should he succeed in land- 
ing an expeditionary force upon American 
soil. 

When I first came back from the war 
front I marvelled that sensible persons so 



"Speaking of Prussians — '^ 

often asked me what sort of people the Ger- 
mans were, as though Germans were a 
stranger race, like Patagonians or the South 
Sea Islanders, living in some remote and 
untravelled corner of the globe. I felt like 
telling them that Germans in Germany were 
like the Germans they knew in America — 
in the main, God-fearing, orderly, hard- 
working, self-respecting citizens. But 
through these intervening months I have 
changed my mind ; to-day I should make a 
different answer. I would say, to him who 
asked that question now, that the same trac- 
tability of temperament which, under the 
easy-going, flexible workings of our Amer- 
ican plan of living makes the German-born 
American so readily conform to his physical 
and metaphysical surroundings here, and 
makes his progeny so soon to amalgamate 
with our fused and conglomerated stock, 
has the effect, in his Fatherland, of all the 
more easily and all the more firmly filling 
his mind and shaping his deeds in conform- 
ity with the exact and rigorous demands 
of the Prussianism that has been shackled 

[37] 



'^speaking of Prussians — '^ 

upon him since his empire ceased to be a 
group of petty states. 

We have got to remember, then, that the 
Germany with which we have broken is 
not the Germany of Heine and Goethe and 
Haeckel and Beethoven; not the Germany 
which gave us Steuben in the Revolution- 
ary War, and Sigel and Schurz in the Civil 
War; not the Germany of the chivalrous, 
lovable Saxon, or yet of the music-loving, 
home-loving Bavarian; not the Germany 
which was the birthplace of the kindly, hon- 
ourable, industrious, patriotic German- 
speaking neighbour round the corner from 
you — but the fanatical, tyrannical, power- 
mad, blood-and-iron Prussianised Ger- 
many of Bismarck and Von Bernhardi, of 
the Crown Prince and the Junkers — that 
passionate Prussianised Germany which 
for forty years through the instrumentality 
of its ruling classes — not necessarily its 
Kaiser, but its real ruling classes — has been 
jealously striving to pervert every native 
ounce of its scientific and its inventive and 
its creative genius out of the paths of prog- 
ress and civilisation and to jam it into the 

[38] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

grooves of the greatest autocratic machine, 
the greatest organism for killing off human 
beings, the greatest engine of misbegotten 
and misdirected efficiency that was ever cre- 
ated in the world. Because we have an 
admiration for one of these two Germanys 
is no more a reason why we should abate 
our indignation and our detestation for the 
other Germany than that because a man 
loves a cheery blaze upon his hearthstone 
he should refuse to fight a forest fire. 

We have got to remember another thing. 
If our oversea observations of this war 
abroad have taught us anything, they should 
have taught us that the German Army — 
and when I say army I mean in this case, 
not its men but its officers, since in the Ger- 
man Army the officers are essentially the 
brain and the power and the motive force 
directing the unthinking, blindly obedient 
mass beneath them — that the German Army 
is not an army of good sportsmen. And 
that, I take it, is an even more important 
consideration upon the field of battle than 
it is upon the athletic field. As the saying 
goes, the Germans don't play the game. It 

[39] 



'^ speaking of Prussians — '' 



is as inconceivable to imagine German of- 
ficers going in for baseball or football or 
cricket as it is to imagine American volun- 
teers marching the goose step or to imagine 
Englishmen relishing the cut-and-dried 
calisthenics of a Turnverein, 

The Germans are not an outdoor race; 
they are not given to playing outdoor sports 
and abiding by the rules of those sports, as 
Englishmen and as Americans are. And in 
war — that biggest of all outdoor games — it 
stands proved against them that they do not 
play according to the rules, except they be 
rules of their own making. It may be 
argued that the French are not an outdoor 
race or a sport-loving race, as we conceive 
sports. But, on the other hand, the French- 
man is essentially romantic and essentially 
dramatic, and, whether in war or in victory 
afterward, he is likely to exhibit the mag- 
nanimous and the generous virtues rather 
than the cruel and the unkindly ones, be- 
cause, as we all know, it is easier to drama- 
tise one's good impulses than one's evil 
ones. 

Now the German, as has recently been 

[40] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

shown, is neither dramatic nor sportsman- 
like. He is a greedy winner and he is a bad 
loser — a most remarkably bad loser. Good 
sportsmen would not have broken Belgium 
into bloody bits because Belgium stood be- 
tween them and their goal; good sportsmen 
would not have sung the Hymn of Hate, or 
made ''Gott Strafe England/'' their battle 
cry; good sportsmen would not have shot 
Edith Cavell or sunk the Lusitania, Good 
sportsmen would not have packed the help- 
less men and boys of a conquered and a pros- 
trate land off as captives into an enforced 
servitude worse than African slavery; 
would not wantonly have wasted La Fere 
and Chauny and Ham, and a hundred other 
French towns, as they did in March and 
April of this year, for no conceivable rea- 
son than that they must surrender these 
towns back into the hand of the enemy; 
would not have cut down the little orchard 
trees nor shovelled dung into the drinking 
wells; would not, while ostensibly at peace 
with us, have plotted to destroy our indus- 
trial plants and to plant the seeds of sedi- 
tion among our foreign-born citizens, and 

[41] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 



to dismember our country, parceling it out 
between a brown race in Mexico and a yel- 
low race in Japan. Good sports do not do 
these things, and Germany did all of them. 
That means something. 

VIII 

HAVING spread the gospel of force 
for so long, Prussianised Germany 
can understand but one counter-argument 
— force. We must give her back blow for 
blow — a harder blow in return for each 
blow she gives us. "Thrice is he armed 
that hath his quarrel just"; and our quar- 
rel is just. All the same, to make war suc- 
cessfully we must make it with a whole 
heart. We must hold it to be a holy war; 
we must preach a jihad, remembering al- 
ways, now that the Chinese Empire is a 
republic, now that Russia by revolution has 
thrown off the chains of autocracy, that we 
are fighting not only to punish the enemy 
for wrongs inflicted and insults overpa- 
tiently endured ; not only to make the seas 
free to honest commerce; not only for the 

[42] 



'' speaking of Prussians — '^ 

protection of our flag and our ships and the 
lives of our people at home and abroad — 
but along with England, France — yes, and 
Russia — are fighting for the preservation 
of the principles of constitutional and rep- 
resentative government against those few 
remaining crowned heads who hold by the 
divine right of kings, and who believe that 
man was created not a self-governing crea- 
ture but a vassal. 

Merely because we are willing to give 
of our wealth and our granaries and our 
steel mills, we cannot expect to have an 
honourable share in this war, and to share 
as an equal in its final settlement. We must 
risk something more precious than money; 
something more needful than munitions; 
we must risk our manhood. We cannot ex- 
pect England's navy to stand between us 
and harm for our coasts, and France's worn 
battalions to bear the brunt of the trench 
work. 

Knowing nothing of military expediency, 
I yet believe that, for the moral effect upon 
the world and for our own position, when 
the time for making peace comes it would 

[43] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

be better for us, rather than the securing of 
our own soil against attack or invasion, that 
an American flag should wave over Amer- 
ican troops in Flanders; that a Texas cow- 
puncher should lead a forlorn hope in 
France; that a Connecticut clockmaker 
should invent a device which will blunt the 
fangs of that stinging adder of the sea, the 
U-boat, and — who knows? — perhaps scotch 
the poison snake altogether. 

Ma3^be it is true that, in our mistaken for- 
bearance, we have failed and come short. 
Maybe we have endured too long and too 
patiently; we can atone for all that. 
But— — 

^ Without the shedding of blood there is 
no remission of sins. 



IX 



1AM coming now to what seems to me 
to be the most important consideration 
of all. In this war upon which we have 
entered our chief enemy is a nation firmly 
committed to the belief that whatever it 
may do is most agreeable in the sight of 

[44] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

God. It is firmly committed to the belief 
that the acts of its Kaiser, its Crown Prince, 
its government, its statesmen, its generals 
and its armies are done in accordance with 
the will and the purposes of God. And, by 
the same token, it is committed, with equal 
firmness, to the conviction that the designs 
and the deeds of all the nations and all the 
peoples opposed to their nation must per- 
force be obnoxious to God. By the proc- 
esses of their own peculiar theology — a the- 
ology which blossomed and began to bear 
its fruit after the war started, but for which 
the seed had been sown long before — God 
is not Our God but Their God. He is not 
the common creator of mankind, but a spe- 
cial Creator of Teutons. He is a German 
God. For you to say this would sound in 
American ears like sacrilege. For me to 
write it down here smacks of blasphemy 
and impiety. But to the German — in Ger- 
many — it is sound religion, founded upon 
the Gospels and the Creed, proven in the 
Scriptures, abundantly justified in the per- 
formances and the intentions of an anointed 
and a sanctified few millions among all the 

[45] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

unnumbered millions who breed upon the 
earth. 

Now here, by way of a beginning, is the 
proof of it. This proof is to be found in 
a collection of original poems published by 
a German pastor, the Reverend Herr Dok- 
tor Konsistorialat D. Vorwerk. In the first 
edition of his book there occurred a para- 
phrase of the Lord's Prayer, of which the 
following are the last three petitions and 
the close: 



a' 



'Though the warrior's bread be scanty, 
do Thou work daily death and tenfold woe 
unto the enemy. Forgive in merciful long- 
suffering each bullet and each blow which 
misses its mark! Lead us not into the temp- 
tation of letting our wrath be too tame in 
carrying out Thy divine judgment! De- 
liver us and our Ally from the infernal 
Enemy and his servants on earth. Thine is 
the kingdom. The German Land; may we, 
by aid of Thy steel-clad hand, achieve the 
power and the glory." 

From subsequent editions of the work of 
Pastor Vorwerk this prayer was omitted. 

[46] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

It is said to have been denounced as blas- 
phemous by a religious journal, published 
in Germany — but not in Berlin. But evi- 
dently no one within the German Empire, 
either in authority or out of it, found any 
fault with the worthy pastor's sentiment 
that the Germans, above all other races — 
except possibly the Turks, who appear to 
have been taken into the Heavenly fold by 
a special dispensation — are particularly fa- 
voured and endowed of God, and enjoy His 
extraordinary — one might almost be tempt- 
ed to say His private — guardianship, love 
and care. For in varying forms this fetish- 
ism is expressed in scores of places. Con- 
sider this example, which cannot have lost 
much of its original force in translation: 

^'How can it be that Germany is sur- 
rounded by nothing but enemies and has not 
a single friend? Is not this Germany's own 
fault? No! Do you not know that Prince 
of Hades, whose name is Envy, and who 
unites scoundrels and sunders heroes? Let 
us, therefore, rejoice that Envy has thus 
risen up against us ; it only shows that God 

[47] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

has exalted and richly blessed us. Think 
of Him who was hanged on the Cross and 
seemed forsaken of God, and had to tread 
in such loneliness His path to victory! My 
German people, even if thy road be strewn 
with thorns and beset by enemies, press on- 
ward, filled with defiance and confidence. 
The heavenly ladder is still standing. Thou 
and thy God, ye are the majority!" 

I have quoted these extracts from the 
printed and circulated book of an ordained 
and reputable German clergyman, and pre- 
sumably also a popular and respected Ger- 
man clergyman, because I honestly believe 
them to be not the individual mouthings of 
an isolated fanatic, but the voice of an enor- 
mous number of his fellow countrymen, ex- 
pressing a conviction that has come to be 
common among them since August, 19 14. 

I believe, further, that they should be 
quoted because knowledge of them will the 
better help our own people here in the 
United States to understand the temper of 
a vast group of our enemies; will help us 
to understand the motives behind some of 

[48] 



'' speaking of Prussians — '' 

the forms of hostility and reprisal that un- 
doubtedly they are going to attempt to in- 
flict upon the United States ; help us, I hope, 
to understand that, upon our part, in wag- 
ing this war an over-measure of forbear- 
ance, a mistaken charity, or a faith in the 
virtue of his fair promises is only wasted 
when it is visited upon an adversary who, 
for his part, is upborne by the perverted 
spiritualism and the degenerated self- 
idolatry of a Mad Mullah. It is all very 
well to pour oil on troubled waters; it is 
foolishness to pour it on wildfire. 



X 



IN this same connection it may not be 
amiss for us to consider the predomi- 
nant and predominating viewpoints of an- 
other and an equally formidable group of 
the foemen. In October, 191 3, nearly a 
year before Germany started the World 
War, one of the recognised leaders of the 
association who called themselves ^^Young 
Germany" wrote in the official organ, the 
accepted mouthpiece of the Junker set and 

[49] 



'' speaking of Prussians — '' 

the Crown Prince's favoured adherents, a 
remarkable statement — that is, it would 
have been a remarkable statement coming 
from any other source than the source from 
whence it did come. It read as follows : 

^War is the noblest and holiest expression 
of human activity. For us, too, the great 
glad hour of battle will strike. Still and 
deep in the German heart must live the joy 
of battle and the longing for it. Let us 
ridicule to the uttermost the old women 
in breeches who fear war and deplore it 
as cruel or revolting. War is beautiful. 
. . . When here on earth a battle is won 
by German arms and the faithful dead as- 
cend to heaven, a Potsdam lance corporal 
will call the guard to the door and ^Old 
Fritz,' springing from his golden throne, 
will give the command to present arms. 
That is the heaven of Young Germany!" 

The likening of Heaven to a place of 
eternal beatitude, populated by German 
soldiers, with a Potsdam lance corporal suc- 
ceeding Saint Peter at the gate, and ^'Old 

[50] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

Fritz" — Frederick the Great — in sole and 
triumphant occupancy of the Golden 
Throne, where, according to the concep- 
tions of the most Christian races, The Al- 
mighty sits, is a picture requiring no com- 
ment. 

It speaks for itself. Also it speaks for 
the paranoia of militant Prussianism. 

I think I am in position to tell something 
of the growth of these sentiments among the 
Germans. As I stated on almost the first 
page of this little book, it fell to my lot to 
be on German soil in September and Oc- 
tober of that first year of the Great War, 
before there was any prospect of our en- 
tering it as a belligerent Power, and when 
the civilian populace, having been exalted 
by the series of unbroken victories that had 
marked the first stage of hostilities for the 
German forces, east and west, was suffering 
from the depressions occasioned by the de- 
feat before Paris, the retreat from the 
Marne back to the Aisne, and finally by the 
growing fear that Italy, instead of coming 
into the conflict as an ally of the two Teu- 
tonic Empires, might, if she became an 

[51] 



'^speaking of Prussians — " 

active combatant at all, cast in her lot with 
France and with England. 

It was from civilians that I got a sense 
of the intellectual motive powers behind the 
mass of civilians in Rhenish Prussia. It 
was from them that I learned something of 
the real German meaning of the German 
word Kultur, In view of recent and pres- 
ent developments on our side of the ocean, 
culminating in our entry into the war, I 
am constrained to believe I may perhaps, 
in my own small way, contribute to Amer- 
ican readers some slight measure of appre- 
ciation of what that Kultur means and may 
mean as applied to other and lesser nations 
by its creators, protagonists and proud pro- 
prietors. 

I heard nothing of Kultur from the Ger- 
man military men with whom I had there- 
tofore come into contact in Belgium and 
in Northern France, and whom I still was 
meeting daily both in their social and in 
their official capacities. So far as one might 
judge by their language and their behaviour 
they, almost withouit an exception, were 
heartily at war for a hearty love of war — 

[52] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

the officers, I mean. To them the war — 
the successful prosecution of it, regardless 
of the cost; the immediate glory, and the 
final ascendancy over all Europe and Asia 
of the German arms — was everything. 
With them nothing else counted but that — 
except, of course, the ultimate humbling of 
Great Britain in the dust. Seemingly the 
woful side of the situation, the losses and 
the sufferings and the horrors, concerned 
them not a whit. War for war's sake; that 
was their religion; never mind what had 
gone before; never mind what might come 
after. To make war terribly and success- 
fully, to make it with f rightfulness and with 
a frightful speed, was their sole aim. 

Never did I hear them, or any one of 
them, openly invoking the aid of the 
Creator. They were content with the tools 
forged for their hands by their military 
overlords. As for the men in the ranks, if 
they did any thinking on their own account 
it was not visible upon the surface. Their 
business was to use their bodies, not their 
heads; their trade to obey orders. They 
knew that business and they followed that 

[53] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

trade. And already poor little wasted Bel- 
gium stood a smoking, bloody monument to 
their thorough, painstaking and most ef- 
ficient craftsmanship. 

Nor, except among the green troops 
which had not yet been under fire, was there 
any expressed hatred, either with officers 
or men, for the opposing soldiers. During 
our experiences in the battle lines, and di- 
rectly behind the battle lines, in the weeks 
immediately preceding the time of which 
I purpose to write, we had aimed at a plan 
of ascertaining, with perfect accuracy, 
whether the German forces we encountered 
had seen any service except theoretical 
service. If we ran across a command whose 
members spoke contemptuously of the 
French or the English or the Belgian sol- 
diers, we might make sure in our own minds 
that here were men who had yet to come to 
grips at close range with their enemy. 

On the other hand, troops who actually 
had seen hard fighting rarely failed to 
evince a sincere respect, and in some in- 
stances a sort of reluctant admiration, for 
the courage and the steadfastness of their 

[54] 



'' speaking of Prussians — '^ 

adversaries. They were convinced — and 
that I suppose was only natural — of the 
superiority of the German soldiers, man 
for man, over the soldiers of any other na- 
tion; but they had been cured of the earlier 
delusion that most of the stalwart heroes 
were to be found on the one side and most 
of the weaklings and cravens on the other. 
Likewise the hot furnaces of battle had 
smelted much of the hate out of their hearts. 
The slag was gone ; what remained was the 
right metal of soldierliness. I imagine this 
has been true in a greater or less degree 
of all so-called civilised wars where brave 
and resolute men have fought against brave 
and resolute men. Certainly I know it to 
have been true of the first periods of this 
present war. 

XI 

BUT fifty or a hundred miles away on 
German soil, among the home-biding 
populace, was a different story. It was there 
I found out about Kultur, It was there I 
first began to realise that, not content with 
assuming a direct and intimate partnership 

[55] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

with Providence, civilian Germany was 
taking Providence under its patronage, was 
remodelling its conceptions of Deity to be 
purely and solely a German Deity. 

That more or less ribald jingle called 
^'Me und Gott!" aimed at the Kaiser and 
frequently repeated in this country a few 
years before, had, in the face of what we 
now beheld, altogether lost the force of its 
one-time humorous application. As we ap- 
praised the prevalent sentiment, it had, in 
the sober, serious consciousness of other- 
wise sane men and women, become the truth 
and less than the truth. 

Any Christian race, going to war in what 
it esteems to be a righteous cause, prays to 
God to bless its campaigns with victory and 
to sustain its arms with fortitude. It had 
remained for this Christian race to assume 
that the God to whom they addressed their 
petitions was their own peculiar God, and 
that His Kingdom on Earth was Germany 
and Germany only; and that His chosen 
people now and forevermore would be Ger- 
mans and Germans only. 

This is not a wild statement. Trust- 

[56] 



''Speaking of Prussians — " 

worthy evidence in support of it will pres- 
ently be offered. 

We met some weirdly interesting per- 
sons during our enforced sojourn there in 
Aix la Chapelle in September and Octo- 
ber of that year. There was, for example, 
the invalided officer who never spoke of 
England or the English that he did not 
grind his teeth together audibly. I have 
never yet been able to decide whether this 
was a bit of theatricalism designed to make 
more forcible than the words he uttered his 
detestation for the country which, most of 
all, had balked Germany in her designs 
upon France and upon the mastery of the 
seas — a sort of dental punctuation for his 
spoken anathemas, as it were — or whether 
it was an involuntary expression of his feel- 
ings. In either event he grated his teeth 
very loudly, very frequently and very ef- 
fectively. 

There was the young German petty of- 
ficer, also on sick leave, who told me with 
great earnestness and professed to believe 
the truth of it that two captured English 
surgeons had been summarily executed be- 

[57] 



^'Speaking of Prussians — '^ 



cause in their surgical kits had been found 
instruments especially designed for the 
purpose of gouging out the eyes of wounded 
and helpless Germans. 

And there was the spectacled scientist- 
author-spy, who dropped in on two of us 
one morning at the hotel where we were 
quartered, and who thereafter favoured us 
at close intervals with many hours of his 
company. It was from this person more 
than from any other that I acquired what I 
believed to be a fairly adequate conception 
of the views held then and thereafter and 
now by an overwhelming majority of edu- 
cated Prussians, trained in the Prussian 
school of thought and propaganda. 

I cannot now recall this person's name, 
though I knew it well at the time; but I 
do recall his appearance. He was tall and 
slender, with red hair; a lean, keen intel- 
lectual face; and a pair of weak, pale-blue 
eyes, looking out through heavy convex 
glasses. He spoke English, French and 
Danish with fluency. He had been a world 
traveller and had written books on the sub- 
iect of travel, which he showed us. He had 

[58] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

been an inventor of electrical devices and 
had written at least one book on the sub- 
ject of electric-lighting development. He 
had been an amateur photographer of some 
note evidently, and had written rather ex- 
tensively on that subject. 

His present employment was not so easily 
discerned, though it was quite plain that, 
like nearly every intelligent civilian in that 
part of Germany, he was engaged upon 
some service more or less closely related to 
the military and governmental activities of 
the empire. He wore the brassard of the 
Red Cross on his arm, it is true, but appar- 
ently had nothing really to do with hospital 
or ambulance work. And he had at his 
disposal a military automobile, in which he 
made frequent and more or less extended 
excursions into the occupied territory of 
France and Belgium. 

After one or two visits from him we de- 
cided that, by some higher authority, he 
had been assigned to the dual task of ascer- 
taining our own views regarding Ger- 
many's part in the conflict and of influenc- 
ing our minds if possible to accept the views 

[59] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 



he and his class held. He may have had 
an even more important mission; we 
thought sometimes that he perhaps was do- 
ing a little espionage work, either on his 
own account or under orders, because he be- 
gan to seek our company about the time we 
noted a cessation of clumsy activities on 
the part of those two preposterously mys- 
terious sleuths of the German Secret Service 
who, until then, had been watching us pretty 
closely. 

Be this as it may, he manifested a gentle- 
manly but persistent curiosity regarding our 
observations and regarding the articles 
which he knew we were writing for Amer- 
ican consumption. And meantime he lost 
no opportunity of preaching into our ears 
the theories and the dogmas of his Prus- 
sianized Kultur. 

I remember that, on almost his first call 
upon us, either my companion or myself 
remarked upon the united and the whole- 
hearted devotion the civilian populace of 
the province, from the youngest to the old- 
est, exhibited for the German cause. In- 
stantly his posture changed. From the po- 

[60] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

lite interviewer he turned into the zealot 
who preaches a holy cause. His lensed eyes 
became pallid blue sparks; and he said: 

^'Surely — and why not? For forty-odd 
years we have been educating our people to 
believe that only through war and through 
conquest could our nation achieve its place 
in the sun — elbowroom for its industrial 
and its spiritual development. Germany is 
a giant — the giant of the universe and she 
must have breathing space; and only by 
the swallowing up of smaller states can she 
get that breathing space. Almost at the 
mother's breast we teach our babies that. 
Do you know, my friends, what the first 
question is, in the first primer of geog- 
raphy, which German children hear when 
they enter school? 

''No? Then I will tell you. The first 
question is 'What is Germany?' And the 
answer is 'My Fatherland — a country en- 
tirely surrounded by Enemies!' 

"So you see, gentlemen, we start at the 
cradle and at the kindergarten to teach our 
young people what it means to live with 
Russia on one side of them and with France 

[61] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '^ 

and Belgium and Britain on the other. 
They cannot forget for one instant the task 
that lies before them. Their educators — 
parents, teachers, pastors, military instruc- 
tors, officials of every rank and every grade 
— never let them forget it." 

XII 

EVEN more illuminating were his 
views with regard to the position of 
Germany in Europe before the war began. 
He admitted that for years, by the neigh- 
bour-peoples, Germany had been feared 
and distrusted. This, he insisted, was not 
Germany's fault, but a fear and a distrust 
born of envy and malice among deteriorated 
and decaying nations for a land which, so 
far as Europe, at least, was concerned, was 
the mother of all the virtues and all the 
great benevolent impulses of the century. 
He denied that Germany had ever been 
overbearing or threatening; denied that 
anything except jealousy could lie at the 
back of the general suspicion directed 
against Prussia, not only by aliens but — 

[62] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '^ 

before the war began — by Bavaria and by 
Saxony as well. 

"Germany," he said to me one day, "has 
earned the right to rule this Hemisphere; 
and Germany is going to rule it! When 
we have conquered our enemies, as conquer 
them we shall — ^when we have implanted 
among them our own German culture, our 
own German institutions and our own Ger- 
man form of government, which surely we 
also shall do — they will, in succeeding gen- 
erations, be the better and the happier for 
it. They will come to know, then, that the 
guns of our fleets and the rifles of our sol- 
diers brought them blessings in disguise. 
Out of their present sufferings and their 
future humiliations will spring up the bene- 
fits of German civilisation. 

"At first they may not want to accept our 
German civilisation. They will have to 
accept it — at the point of the bayonet if 
necessary. If it is required that these petty 
lesser states should be exterminated alto- 
gether, we shall not hesitate before that task 
either. They are decadents, dying now of 
dry rot and degeneracy; better that they 

[63] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

should be dead altogether than that the 
spread of German Kultur through the 
world should be checked or diverted from 
its course. We shall teach the world that 
the individual exists for the good of the 
state, rather than that the state exists for 
the individual." 

To the miseries that had been inflicted 
upon Belgium, and which he himself had 
had opportunity to view at first hand, he 
gave no heed — this scholarly pundit- 
preacher of the tenets of Prussianism. 
With a wave of his hand he dismissed the 
question of the rights and wrongs of the 
German invasion of Belgium. He wasted 
no sympathy upon Louvain, sacked and pil- 
laged and burned, or upon Dinant, razed to 
the ground for the most part, and with seven 
hundred of its male inhabitants put to death 
on one slaughter-day in punitive punish- 
ment for acts of guerrilla warfare alleged 
to have been committed by civilians against 
Germans coming upon them in uniform. 

Yet I do not think that, in most of the 
relations of life, he was a cruel or even an 
unkind man. He merely saw Belgium 

[64] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

through glasses made in Germany. He ex- 
plained his attitude substantially after this 
fashion, as I now recall the sense and the 
phrasing of his words: 

^'What difference does it make to pos- 
terity that we have had to destroy a few 
hotbeds of ignorance and shoot a few thou- 
sand undisciplined, uneducated, turbulent 
persons? What difference though we may 
have to continue to destroy yet more Bel- 
gian towns and shoot yet more Belgian ci- 
vilians? Ultimately the results of our op- 
erations are bound to redound to the greater 
glory of the Greater German Empire, 
which means European civilisation. 

"My friend, do you know that nearly a 
quarter of the inhabitants of Belgium are 
illiterates, as you would put it in English 
— Unalphabets, as we Germans say? Well, 
that is true — a quarter of them can neither 
read nor write. In Germany only a frac- 
tional part of one per cent of our people 
are illiterate to that extent. We have taken 
Belgium by force of arms and we are never 
going to give it up. Already it is a prov- 
ince of the German Empire. 

[65] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

"When our lawgivers have followed our 
soldiers across the expanded frontiers of our 
Empire; when we have made the German 
language the language of annexed Belgium ; 
when we have introduced our incomparably 
superior methods into all departments of 
Belgian life; when we have taught all the 
Belgians to speak the German tongue, and 
have required of them that they do speak 
it — then these Belgians, as Germans, will 
be better off than ever they could have been 
as Belgians. Never fear; we shall know 
how to handle them. 

"With Alsace and Lorraine we were too 
mild for their own good. With Belgium 
we shall be stern ; but we shall be just. It 
is the predestined fate of Belgium that she 
should become a German possession and a 
German territory. Geography and destiny 
both point the way for us, and we Germans 
never turn from the duties intrusted to us 
by our God and our Kaiser! We mean to 
teach these lesser peoples before we are 
through that the individual exists for the 
good of the State, not, as some of them pro- 

[66] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

fess to believe, that the State exists for the 
good of the individual." 



XIII 

IT never seemed to occur to him that 
Belgians or Frenchmen or Dutchmen 
might personally prefer to keep on being 
Belgians or Frenchmen or Dutchmen, and 
might have some rights in the matter; in- 
deed might prefer to die rather than live 
under a system intolerable to human beings 
reared outside the scope of Prussian influ- 
ence. So far as I might judge, this never 
occurred to any of the less eloquent but 
equally ardent defenders of this peculiar 
brand of Kultur with whom I talked dur- 
ing that fall in the Rhineland country. 

We must have been blind then, my com- 
panion and I — yes, and deaf too; for we 
diagnosed this bigotry as evidences of an 
egomania, probably confined to a few hun- 
dreds or a few thousands among the Ger- 
man-speaking peoples. In the light of what 
has happened since we all know that the 
disease affected a whole nation, and was 

[67] 



''Speaking of Prussians — " 

a disease of which, as yet, the frequent up- 
settings of their original programme and 
the absolute certainty that the programme 
itself can never be carried out until Europe 
and America both are graveyards have not 
to any very noticeable extent served to op- 
erate as a cure. 

In those early, optimistic days these 
paranoiacs conceived of a world that should 
sometime be altogether Prussianised. Their 
vision was not bounded by the seas about 
their own Continent; it extended to other 
Continents, our own included. That dream 
is over and done with. What they have 
yet to learn — and they will only be taught 
it at the muzzle of guns — is that a civilisa- 
tion cannot endure when it is half Prussian 
and half free. It is my understanding that 
this country, along with ten or twelve oth- 
ers, is now committed to the task of en- 
forcing this lesson upon the consciousness 
of the only confederation of enemies to a 
representative form of government now left 
upon either hemisphere. 



[68] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 



XIV 

A PROPHET is nearly always a bore. 
He is apt to be tiresome when ex- 
pounding his predictions, and likely to be- 
come a common nuisance should his predic- 
tions come true. Indeed, the I-told-you-so 
person is oftentimes a worse pest than the 
I-am-now-telling-you-so individual. I have 
no desire to assume either role; but here 
lately I have not been able to restrain my 
satisfaction at finding, as I believed, that 
two of my own private convictions are about 
to be justified by the accomplished fact. 
As a result of all that I saw and heard in 
the war zone, more than two years and a 
half ago, I made up my mind to the prob- 
able consummation of these contingencies 
— namely: 

First: That, despite her earlier suc- 
cesses, despite all her preparedness and all 
her efficiency and all her valour, Germany 
eventually would be defeated as the South- 
ern Confederacy was defeated — by being 
bled white and starved thin. 

[69] 



^^ speaking of Prussians — " 

Second: That when to Germany's rul- 
ers this prospect became certain they would 
with deliberate intent embroil the United 
States in the conflict as an avowed and de- 
clared enemy, in order that the men who 
drove Germany to the slaughter might save 
their faces before their own people, at the 
front and at home, by saying to them in ef- 
fect: "We were strong enough to beat all 
Europe and all Asia; we were not strong 
enough to beat the supreme Power of the 
New World too; we, with our allies, could 
not withstand the combined forces of the 
whole earth." 

Though Germany is still very far, one 
imagines, from the point of complete ex- 
haustion, it is not to be denied that she is 
bleeding white and starving thin. And, 
as all fair-minded patriotic men on this side 
of the ocean agree, she did, by a persistent 
campaign of aggressions against our flag, 
and by murdering our people on the high 
seas, and by plotting against our industries 
and our national integrity, finally force us 
into the war. 

Having been forced into the war, as we 

[70] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

are, it is well that our people should know 
to the fullest possible degree not only what 
they are fighting for — the preservation of 
democracy in the world, for one thing — but 
that likewise they should know and in that 
knowledge recognise the danger to us, of 
the mental forces operating behind the mili- 
tary arm of our national enemy. 

I think they should know that in the 
minds of these self-idolaters, who have laid 
claim to Creator and to creation as their 
own ordained possessions, we shall stand in 
no different light than the Belgians stand, 
or the Serbians, or the Poles, or the people 
of Northern France. Upon us, if the chance 
is vouchsafed them, they would visit a heap- 
ing measure of the same wrath they poured 
on those invaded and broken nations of 
Europe, showing to Americans no more 
mercy than they showed to them. 

I deem it my duty, therefore, to write 
what already I have written in this little 
book, and, before closing it, to append cer- 
tain quotations, as particularly illuminating 
evidences of the besetting mania that has 
been fastened upon the brains of an other- 

[71] 



'^speaking of Prussians — " 

wise rational race of our fellow beings 
through two generations of crafty implant- 
ing and fostering by greater maniacs, wear- 
ing crowns and shoulder straps, and — yes, 
the livery of Our Lord and Master. 

For the quotations from the poetic ut- 
terances of the Reverend Doctor Vorwerk, 
which appeared in preceding paragraphs of 
this article, the writer is indebted to a docu- 
mentation compiled from authentic Ger- 
man sources by a Dane, the Reverend J. P. 
Bang, D. D., professor of theology at the 
University of Copenhagen, a famous Luth- 
eran institution, under the title of Hurrah 
and Hallelujah — which, incidentally, was a 
title borrowed from the published poetic 
works of this same Doctor Vorwerk. Doc- 
tor Bang's symposium has lately been pub- 
lished in English by the American pub- 
lisher, Doran, with an introduction by 
"Ralph Connor," the Canadian novelist, 
otherwise Major Charles W. Gordon, of the 
Canadian Overseas Forces. 



[72] 



"Speaking of Prussians 



J J 



H 



XV 

AD Doctor Bang set forth as his own 
views, as a neutral, the amazing ut- 
terances which make up the bulk of his 
compilation, no one here or abroad would 
have believed that he described a true con- 
dition. But he was smarter than that. He 
was mainly content to repeat literal trans- 
lations of indubitable prayers, poems, ser- 
mons, addresses — written and spoken state- 
ments of contemporary German clergymen, 
German professors and German statesmen. 

In further support of the point which I 
have been striving to make I mean to take 
the liberty here of adding a few more ex- 
tracts from the first American edition of 
Hurrah and Hallelujah, in each instance 
giving credit to the original German author 
of the same. 

For instance, the Reverend Doctor Vor- 
werk, who appears to specialise in prayers, 
begins one invocation with this sentence, 
which is especially interesting in that the 
good pastor couples the Cherubim, the 

[73] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

Seraphim, and — guess what? — the Zeppe- 
lins in the same breath : 

^'Thou Who dwellest high above Cheru- 
bim, Seraphim and Zeppelins ; Thou Who 
art enthroned as a God of Thunder in the 
midst of lightning from the clouds, and 
lightning from sword and cannon, send 
thunder, lightning, hail and tempest hur- 
tling upon our enemy; bestow upon us his 
banners; hurl him down into the dark 
burial pits!" 

Another poet, Franz Philippi by name, 
in a widely circulated work called World- 
Germany, delivers himself in part as fol- 
lows : 

"Formerly German thought was shut up 
in her corner; but now the world shall have 
its coat cut according to German measure 
and, as far as our swords flash and German 
blood flows, the circle of the earth shall 
come under the tutelage of German activ- 
ity." 

[74] 



"Speaking of Prussians — '' 

Herr J. Suze, a prose writer, says with 
the emphasis of profound conviction: 

"The Germans are first before the Throne 
of God — Thou couldst not place the golden 
crown of victory in purer hands." 

On November 13, 1914, according to 
Doctor Bang, a German theological pro- 
fessor preached an address which the Ber- 
liner Lokal Anzeiger reproduced, with fa- 
vourable editorial comment. Here is a typ- 
ical paragraph from this sermon: 

"The deepest and most thought-inspiring 
result of the war is 'the German God.' Not 
the national God such as the lower nations 
worship, but 'Our God,' Who is not 
ashamed of belonging to us, the peculiar 
acquirement of our heart." 

The Reverend H. Francke is a pastor in 
the city of Liegnitz. From his pulpit he de- 
livered a series of so-called war sermons, 
which afterward, at the request of the mem- 
bers of his flock, were printed in a book, 

[75] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

the cover of which was ornamented with 
the Iron Cross. And we find the Reverend 
Francke adding his voice to the chorus 
thus: 

"Germany is precisely — who would ven- 
ture to deny it? — the representative of the 
highest morality, of the purest humanity, 
of the most chastened Christianity." 

The Reverend Walter Lehmann, pastor 
at the town of Hamberge, in Holstein, went 
a trifle further. When he got out his book 
of war sermons he published it under the 
title About the German God; and therein, 
among other things, he said : 

"This means that we go forth to war as 
Christians, precisely as Christians, as we 
Germans understand Christianity; it means 
that we have God on our side. . . . Can 
the Russians, the French, the Serbians, the 
English, say this? No; not one of them. 
Only we Germans can say it. . . . If God 
is for us who can be against us? It is 
enough for us to be a part of God. ... A 

[76] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

nation" — Germany — "which is God's seed 
corn for the future. . . . Germany is the 
centre of God's plans for the world. . . . 
That glorious feat of arms forty-four years 
ago" — the Battle of Sedan — "gives us 
courage to believe that the German soul 
is the world's soul ; that God and Germany 
belong to one another." 

These are the concluding words of the 
Reverend Lehmann's book About the Ger- 
man God: 

"Oh, that the German God may perme- 
ate the world! Oh, that the eternal victory 
may blossom before the God of the German 
soul!" 

It will not do to slight the Herr Pastor 
Job Rump, lie, Doctor, of Berlin. Hearken 
a moment to a word or two from one of 
Doctor Rump's published pamphlets: 

"A corrupt world, fettered in monstrous 
sin, shall, by the will of God, be healed by 
the German nature. . . . Ye" — the Ger- 

[77] 



"Speaking of Prussians — " 

mans — "are the chosen generation, the royal 
priesthood, the holy nation, the peculiar 
people." 

A learned and no doubt a pious professor, 
Herr G. Roethe, is credited with this mod- 
est claim: 

^'While other nations are born, ripen and 
grow old, the Germans alone possess the 
gift of rejuvenescence." 

And so on and so forth, for two hundred 
and thirty-four pages of Hurrah and Hal- 
lelujah. The run of the contents is quite up 
to sample. None of us can object to these 
reverend gentlemen seeking to walk with 
God; what we do object to is their under- 
taking to lead Him. 

XVI 

SO far as I can tell, Doctor Bang has 
not overlooked a single bet. He makes 
out a complete case; and, what is more, in 
so doing he relies not upon his own con- 
clusions, but upon the avowed utterances 

[78] 



"Speaking of Prussians— ^^ 

of distinguished German savants, clergy- 
men and versifiers. 

These, then, are the spoken thoughts of 
civilian leaders of our enemy. If the lead- 
ers believe these things their followers must 
also believe them; must believe, with the 
Reverend Lehmann and the Reverend Vor- 
werk, that God is a German God, and 
should properly be so addressed by a wor- 
shipper upon his knees, since one prayer be- 
gins ^^O German God!"; must believe, 
with Von Bernhardi — who spoke of ^'the 
miserable life of all small states" — that "to 
allow to the weak the same right of exist- 
ence as to the strong, vigorous nation means 
presumptuous encroachment upon the nat- 
ural laws of development" ; and with Treit- 
schke, that "the small nations have no right 
to existence and ought to be swallowed up" ; 
and with Lasson, that "It is moral, inas- 
much as it is reasonable, that the small 
states, in spite of treaties, should become the 
prey of the strongest" ; and must believe that 
to Prussia was appointed the task of curing 
the whole world, America included, of what 
— according to the Prussian ideal — ails it. 

[79] 



* ^ >#Si /J yra h-n /«/» /t /r\ "F LJ.-:u*^ t t* f y» ^^ m^ r% ^ ' 



It is the nation which believes these 
things, and which has striven in this war to 
practice what its teachers preached, that we 
now are called upon to fight. If we remem- 
ber this as we go along it will help us to 
understand some of the things the enemy 
will seek to do unto us ; and should help him 
to understand some of the things we mean to 
do unto him. 

Indeed, there is hope of his being able 
some day to understand that we entered this 
war not against a people or a nation so 
much as we entered it against an idea, a 
disease, a form of paranoia, a form of rabies, 
a form of mania which has turned men into 
blasphemous and murderous mad dogs, run- 
ning amuck and slavering in the highways 
of the world. 

What would any intelligent American do 
if a mad dog entered the street where he 
lived, even though that dog, before it went 
mad, had been a kind and docile creature? 
And what is he going to do in the existing 
situation? 

The same answer does for both questions. 
Because there is only one answer. 

[80] 









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